The storyline in
Antiques Roadshow: Discovering America's Hidden Treasures goes like this. You play as Julie, a young history teacher with a knack for finding great antiques. She goes to work at an antiques store run by Mr. Charlie Hinton who wants her to solve a mystery with only an old decoder and a torn off piece of a photo of a music box, both family heirlooms, to guide her on her journey. Her quest starts at a Pennsylvania farmhouse which supposedly contains the music box from the photo. For each level, Hinton gives Julia a list of items to obtain, along with a primary item that she needs to fetch, whose picture will appear in the upper right corner. As she progresses, she may come across companion items which, if obtained, will help increase the value of the primary item.
In Timed Mode, you will see a clock in the top left corner and if you find all of the items before the clock runs out, you'll get additional money, along with unlocking achievements as you go. There is also a Casual Mode which doesn't have the timed parameter. If you get stumped in finding an item, you can press the Hint button and you'll get some aid. It can be in the form of a butterfly which flutters around the screen, landing on an item in your list, or it could be a hint that blacks out the screen and leaves a little spotlight to land on an item. There's also a small green radar screen that you swipe across the area and when it comes across one of your items, the item glows in the screen. You might even get a compass that you must guide around the screen, looking for an item. Sometimes, the Hint simply tells you to use an item in your inventory, since some things that you pick up go into the Items section instead of just disappearing from the list and these will be used to pry boards away from a hidden compartment, search in dark places, obtain out of reach items, break locks keeping you out, and so on. If you prefer pure hidden object, with no adventure aspects, this may not be the game for you. That being said, I normally fit that category, but I really enjoyed having to use my brain in a different way instead of just looking for hidden objects and I found the adventure aspects lots of fun, once I got used to them.
Once you find the primary item and hopefully the companion object(s), you may need to do some quick repairs before traveling to a location of the Antiques Roadshow and presenting your item. These come in the form of timed mini-games and include one where you tap cracks in an item to fill them with composite, one where you must buff the item clean, a slide puzzle where you reconstruct a certificate of authenticity, and one where you must locate small items such as several buttons or gears amidst a pile of hundreds of other different colored, but like items. These mini-games were a nice change of pace from the already fun hidden object scenes.
When you do get to the show and present your prized item, you'll get the background and value of it from one of the show's appraisers. I did a little research on specific items and they don't appear to be real items, but it's still fun listening to the "history." When you return to the shop to discuss your findings with Mr. Hinton, you'll notice that his once-empty shop has begun to fill with the items you have procured. You can later click on them and see their names and values. In between levels, you'll use the decoder and another piece of the photo to get pieces of a message that solves the mystery. While you don't actually do anything other than watch the message get filled in, it's a nice way to tie everything together and I enjoyed the storyline and eventual reveal.
